Sons (19 page)

That was the real beginning.

We talked all the way to Stamford.

She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, this WASP princess of the western world. They had met while he was still a budding psychoanalyst in medical school, an ambition that cut no ice at all with her mother’s father, who objected to the marriage and who threatened to have this “Sicilian gangster” castrated or worse by some gangster friends of his own, he being the owner of a kosher restaurant on Fordham Road in the Bronx and therefore familiar with all kinds of Mafia types who rented him linens and collected his garbage. Joyce Gelb, for such was her mother’s maiden name, was then a student at Hunter College and running with a crowd the likes of which had only recently signed petitions for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. She wasn’t about to take criticism of her Sicilian gangster, who in reality was descended from a mixture of Milanese on his mother’s side and Veronese on his father’s and who anyway had blue eyes which she adored. Joyce told her father he was a bigot and a hypocrite besides, since he hadn’t set foot inside a synagogue since her mother’s death eight years ago, when he had said the Kaddish and promptly begun playing house with his cashier, a busty blond specimen of twenty-four. The couple, Joyce Gelb and Frank Castelli, eloped in the summer of 1941, fleeing to Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace in Elkton, Frank constantly glancing over his shoulder for signs of pursuing
mohelim.
In 1942, the Castellis bought a small house in Hicksville, Long Island. Secure from the draft (he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma) he began analyzing the neurotics in Hempstead and environs.

“Do you know the kind of town Hicksville was?” Dana said. “When I was still a kid, the suggestion came up that they should change the name of the town to something
better,
you know? Like there are some towns on Long Island with really beautiful Indian names — Massapequa, Ronkonkoma, Syosset — and even some very nice, well,
suburban
-sounding names like Bethpage and Lynbrook and, well you know. So guess what? The town fathers
objected!
They actually preferred
Hicksville,
can you imagine that? Which is just what it is, of course — Hicksville, U.S.A., I lived there until I was thirteen years old; the most thrilling thing that happened was the erection of a shopping center, you should pardon the expression.”

At the age of thirteen, as she was entering puberty (“and beginning to
blossom,”
Dana said, and winked and gave me a burlesque comic’s elbow), Dr. Castelli moved his practice and his family to Park Avenue...

“In the mid-Eighties, right?” I said.

“Seventy-ninth,” Dana said.

“Close,” I said.

“No cigar,” she said.

... and Dana began attending the Dalton School, no mean feat for a kid whose Italian grandfather still ran a
latticeria
on First Avenue, and whose Jewish grandfather made a good living keeping the fleishedig plates from the milchedig. She was now, she told me, an English major at Boston University, and she hoped one day to write jokes for television comedians, which I might think a strange and curious ambition for a girl, but after all some of the funniest people in America were women, witness Lady Bird Johnson, she said, without cracking a smile.

We began talking about Kennedy then, both of us realizing with a sudden shock that he had been killed just a year ago, and then doing what people inevitably did when talking about that day in November remembering with almost total recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke (“I could hear them saying, ‘The head, the head,’ and i listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to
me,
that they were all talking about
my
head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet.”). Dana had been in her father’s office, necking on his couch with a boy from CCNY, Friday being Dr. Castelli’s day at Manhattan General, where he worked with addicts on the Narcotics Service. The radio had been tuned to WABC, Bob Dayton spewing machine-gun chatter and canned goodies from The Beatles, when the announcer broke in to say that Kennedy’s motorcade had been fired upon, the news causing Dana to leap up from the couch not a moment too soon, being as she was in a somewhat vulnerable position just then.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, and felt violently protective all at once, ready to strangle the snot-nosed, pimply-faced City College rapist who had dared put his hand under her skirt or whatever it was he’d been doing.

“Well, you know,” Dana said.

“Sure,” I said.

Which led us into talking about the MIT sweatshirt she was wearing, and how she had come into possession of it so early in her college career, the fall term at B.U. having started only in September.

She told me that she had met this dreamy boy at the Fogg Museum one rainy Saturday (Oh, please, I said, where are the violins?) and he’d turned out to be a very sensitive young man who had managed to get out of East Berlin immediately after the Russians lifted their blockade in 1949. (A German, I said, that’s real groovy. What was his father during the war? A baker?) His father, Dana promptly informed me, was Jewish and in fact a survivor of Auschwitz, which, I might remember, was a German concentration camp, in fact
the
camp where four million Jews were annihilated, in fact. His father had chosen to continue living in Germany...

“What’s this guy’s name?” I said.

“I don’t see what difference that makes,” she said.

“I like to know who we’re
talking
about, that’s all,” I said.

“His name is Max Eckstein,” she said.

“He
sounds
like a Max Eckstein,” I said.

“The way
I
sounded like a Radcliffe girl, right?” she said.

“All right, go on, go on,” I said.

... his father had chosen to continue living in Germany, Dana told me, rather than emigrating to Israel or America because he felt that Hitler had almost succeeded in destroying the entire German Jewish community, and if there were to be
any
Jews at
all
in Germany, some survivors had to elect to stay and raise their families there. But whereas he had been slow to recognize what was happening in Germany in ’38 and ’39, he immediately realized in 1949 that the Communists were constructing in Berlin a state not too dissimilar from Hitler’s. He had packed up his wife Dora, his seven-year-old daughter Anna, and his five-year-old son Max, and together they had fled to America. Anna had since married a football player for...

“A what?” I said.

“A football player. For the New York Giants,” Dana said.

“How’d a German refugee get to meet a...?”

“She’s quite American,” Dana said. “She was only
seven
when she came here, you know.”

“Yes, and little Maxie was five.”

“Little Maxie is now twenty,” Dana said. “And not so little.”

Her relationship with Max, she went on to say, was amazingly close, considering the fact she’d known him such a short time, actually only a month and a half, she’d met him in the middle of October on a...

“Yes,” I said, “a rainy Saturday, I know.”

“He’s a very nice person. You’d like him.”

“I hate him,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just how close
is
this relationship?” I asked.

“Close,” Dana said.

“Are you engaged or something?”

“No, but...”

“Going steady?”

“Well, we don’t have
that
kind of an agreement. I mean, I can
see
anybody I
want
to, this isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. I just haven’t
wanted
to go out with anyone else.”

“Well, suppose
I
asked you out?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind.”

“You mean you want to know where I’d take you?”

“No, no. I mean the relationship between Max and me is very close, and I haven’t really any
need
for what you might have in mind,
if
it’s what you have in mind.
That’s
what I mean.”

“What
do you mean?” I said.

“I mean Max and I are very, well,
close,”
she said, and shrugged. “Do you see?”

“No.”

“Well, I really don’t think I need to spell it out,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“So if you want to just go to a movie or something, or maybe take a walk if you’re in the city one weekend...”

“Gee, thanks a whole heap,” I said.

“Well, there’s no sense being dishonest.”

“You’re sure Maxie won’t disapprove? I certainly wouldn’t want to get him upset.”

“His name is
Max, "
Dana said.

“Say, maybe the
three
of us could go to a movie together,” I said. “You think Max might be able to come down one weekend?”

“He’s carrying a very heavy program,” Dana said.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to go alone,” I said. “How about Thursday?”

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”

“Friday then.”

“All right. So long as you understand.”

“I understand only one thing.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that I’m going to marry you.”

My instructor at Gunter Field in Montgomery, Alabama, was a man named Ralph Di Angelo, who had been a civilian pilot before the war, and who — because of the extreme need for trained pilots — had been taken into the Army with a first lieutenant’s commission and immediately assigned to Gunter, where he taught what the Air Force called Basic Flying. Di Angelo was a Service Pilot, and because there was a tiny letter S on his wings, we all called them Shit Wings.

I had gone from Preflight School at Maxwell Field to Primary Flying School in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and from there had reported directly and without furlough to Gunter Field. There were six flying squadrons on the field, each with about a hundred cadets in them. I was in the 379th School Squadron, Class 44J, the 44 designating the year I was expected to be awarded my silver pilot’s wings, the J designating the month and date this event would take place, the first half of May, hopefully.

This was my third day at Gunter, and nobody including myself was feeling too terribly happy just then because we had not been given any leave after Primary and we’d already been told there’d be no Christmas furloughs, either. My father had made plans to come down to Montgomery to visit with me on Christmas Day, but Montgomery was a far cry from Chicago, and besides, I was getting very very tired. At Orangeburg, I had flown the PT-17, which was possibly the most rugged plane ever built, strong enough for aerobatics like snap rolls and Immelmanns, with a fixed-pitch prop and a 225-horsepower Lycoming engine, blue with yellow wings — my instructor called his plane “Yellowjacket,” the name stenciled onto the fuselage just back of the cowling, with a sting-tailed bee, blue with black stripes, yellow-winged like the plane itself, hovering over the black lettering.

I’d had a total of seventy hours in that plane, my instructor being a man who had once run a small airport in Iowa and who was now doing his bit for the Army by making life miserable for aviation cadets. His name was Captain Felix Burmann, and he was a son of a bitch down to his boots. It was rumored that the obstacle course at Maxwell Field (where he had also taught) was named “The Burma Road” in his honor, it being a tortuous winding exhausting piece of real estate that snaked its way around the officers’ golf course, and then down by the river as cadets jogged their little hearts out around it. Son of a bitch or no, he had taught me to fly, and I was feeling like a pretty hot pilot by the time I got to Gunter and was introduced to the biggest damn airplane I had ever seen up close in my life, the BT-13, which was fondly, ha, called the Vultee Vibrator, or so Lieutenant Di Angelo told us the first day we marched out behind him to the flight line.

The lieutenant was olive-complected, with curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a black mustache. Short and somewhat chunky, he kept a dead cigar stub clamped between his teeth at all times, reminding me of Mr. Fornaseri who ran the candy store on Division and Dearborn back in Chicago and who would not be caught dead without his guinea stinker in his mouth. Mr. Fornaseri was from Palermo, and it was reasonable to believe that Lieutenant Di Angelo could have easily blended with the population there — though how he would have fared in Milan was another matter. He came, he told us, from Elmira, New York, and had quickly added,
“Not
the prison there,” a quip we were all too frightened to laugh at. He had then gone on to say that we five cadets would be taught personally by him during our stay at Gunter Field, and that we would be doing all our flying in the BT-13, “this airplane here, which is fondly called the Vultee Vibrator, as you will soon find out.”

“It’s got an unpleasant reputation,” he had said, “but you’ll learn to develop a great deal of respect for it. I know it looks enormous to you, but that’s only because it is; the engine under that housing’s got four hundred and fifty horses in it. I realize you’re all aces already, but you’ve never flown anything with a controllable pitch propeller, or mixture controls, and this is also going to be the first time you’re flying without a helmet and goggles because there’s a canopy to close over your head, as you may have noticed. You’ll be wearing earphones instead because you’ll be in constant radio contact with the tower — that’s another first, you’ve never flown a plane with a radio in it before.

“Now you all heard what the squadron commander told you a little while ago, and I’m going to repeat it now because he was absolutely right, and you might as well understand it. Nobody’s going to coddle you here at Gunter. Both me and this airplane are going to be a lot less forgiving of your mistakes. In Primary, you learned how to take an airplane up and how to bring it down, but here in Basic we’re going to teach you to use it as a tactical weapon, and I can tell you the pressure’s going to be a lot tougher than it was in Primary, no matter
where
you went to Primary — we get them here from all over, believe me, and even the best of them have been known to bawl in their second week. The C.O. asked you to look at the man on your left and then at the one on your right because one of you was sure to wash out of here and end up in navigator or bombardier school. Okay. I’m telling you now that out of you five cadets, there’s a strong possibility only three of you will make it through Basic, and out of those three, only
one
of you might get through Advanced. So you’d better listen hard and keep your heads moving at all limes because you’re here to learn to fly and not to fool around. You’ll notice that there’s a little picture of a burning pitchfork painted behind the cowling of my plane there, and that the name of the plane is The Eighth Circle,’ and whereas I don’t want to
frighten
any of you aces, I also want it clear that I’m going to make life
hell
for you if you don’t learn to fly the way I
want
you to fly.